The United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit recently upheld a United States District Court for the District of Maine Judge's decision to dismiss a Maine plaintiff's medical malpractice claim against a Massachusetts hospital defendant for want of personal jurisdiction over the hospital. The Court of Appeals found it unreasonable to hale hospitals into an out-of-state court merely because they accept out-of-state patients.Plaintiff Danielle Harlow is a Maine resident who suffered a stroke at the age of six while (...) undergoing a medical procedure at Children's Hospital of Boston, Massachusetts. The stroke, allegedly caused by the Hospital's negligence, led to brain damage resulting in partial paralysis and cognitive and behavioral impairments. The procedure was supposed to treat Harlow's rapid heartbeat, a condition related to her Wolff-Parkinson-White Syndrome. Harlow's pediatrician in Maine recommended that she visit Children's Hospital in Boston to treat her arrhythmia. (shrink)

The study of landscape and place has become an increasingly fertile realm of inquiry in the humanities and social sciences. In this new book of essays, selected from presentations at the first annual meeting of the Society for Philosophy and Geography, scholars investigate the experiences and meanings that inscribe urban and suburban landscapes. Gary Backhaus and John Murungi bring philosophy and geography into a dialogue with a host of other disciplines to explore a fundamental dialectic: while our collective and personal (...) activity modifies the landscape, in turn, the landscape modifies human identities, and social and environmental relations. Whether proposing a peripatetic politics, conducting a sociological analysis of building security systems, or critically examining the formation of New York City's municipal parks, each essay sheds distinctive light on this fascinating and engaging aspect of contemporary environmental studies. (shrink)

Tema rada su vestacenja drustvenih naucnika u procesima vodjenim pred Haskim tribunalom, ciji se doprinos sagledava u svetlu dugog razvoja ove prakse. Sire diskusije o sudskoj upotrebi naucnog znanja ukazuju na niz problema u regulisanju vestacenja. Analiziraju se mehanizmi kojima se u razlicitim pravnim kontekstima obezbedjuje naucna pouzdanost i procesna relevantnost vestacenja, kao i primenljivost tih mehanizama na forenzicke doprinose razlicitih drustvenih nauka. Regulisanje vestacenja u Haskom tribunalu se posmatra kao osobeno resenje cije se posledice prate kroz ucesce vestaka u (...) postupcima i kroz javnu percepciju angazmana drustvenih naucnika u tom svojstvu. Cilj ovakvog pristupa je nijansiranje dominantnih predstava o ulozi drustvenih naucnika u Haskom tribunalu i stvaranje preduslova za razumevanje specificnog karaktera njihove vestacke uloge. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Politics, religion and legal argumentation were inextricably intertwined in the reception of John Selden’s Mare Clausum/The Closed Sea (1635). The work’s writing and printing history is closely tied to Stuart foreign policy, particularly James I’s and Charles I’s attempts to tax the Dutch herring fisheries. Mare Clausum’s immediate impact on European international relations has received little attention from historians so far. It is clear, however, that government authorities in London, The Hague and Venice expected an official reply from (...) Hugo Grotius, author of Mare Liberum/the Free Sea (1609) and Swedish ambassador in Paris. Yet the latter declined to assist the Dutch authorities in this matter, blaming them for his imprisonment in 1618–1621 and his second banishment from Holland in 1632. The antipathy was mutual. The Dutch authorities abhorred Grotius’ pleas for religious tolerance and commissioned his Calvinist kinsman Dirk Graswinckel to respond to Selden instead. Graswinckel had already published Libertas Veneta/venetian Liberty (1634), a learned defense of the Republic of Venice’s political interests. In ‘Vindiciae maris liberi’/vindication of the Free Sea (written 1636–1637), he tried –but arguably failed – to reconcile Dutch claims to freedom of navigation, trade and fishing with Venetian claims to the Adriatic. It never appeared in print. (shrink)

In the past, the Hague Conference on Private International Law has shaped how people can become the legal parents of children born in countries other than their own. It did so by creating the 1993 Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoption. It is now interested in developing a convention on international contract pregnancy. We discuss in this commentary what such a convention would have to include for it to be ethically consistent with the Convention on Adoption.

This article explores the presence and function of texts by two spokesmen of the Franciscan Observance sub vicaris, namely Giovanni of Capestrano and Jan Brugman, within a religious miscellany most probably used – if not composed – by the Brothers of the Common Life in the house of Lüchtenhof, founded in 1440 in the neighbourhood of Hildesheim, Lower Saxony. The miscellany attests to the influence of these two prominent preachers beyond their religious order and beyond the geographic areas in which (...) they had been active, thus showing the exchange and interconnection between different branches of the so-called Observant movement.The article first describes the... (shrink)